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Theorizing Diffusion: Tarde and Sorokin Revisited University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Departmental Papers (ASC) Annenberg School for Communication 11-1999 Theorizing Diffusion: Tarde and Sorokin Revisited Elihu Katz University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Katz, E. (1999). Theorizing Diffusion: Tarde and Sorokin Revisited. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 566 (1), 144-155. https://doi.org/10.1177/000271629956600112 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/272 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Theorizing Diffusion: Tarde and Sorokin Revisited Abstract This article is a call for volunteers to stand on the shoulders of Gabriel Tarde and Pitirim Sorokin, who dared to theorize the process of diffusion over a wide variety of disciplines. While all of the social sciences and humanities regularly produce case studies of diffusion, theorizing seems paralyzed. This paralysis stems from the ostensible incommensurability of diffusing items; their refusal to hold still in transit; the complexity of their interactions with the cultures, social structures, and media systems in which potential adopters are embedded; the difficulty ofeconciling r voluntary action and external imposition; and the lack of a disciplinary home. Disciplines Communication | Social and Behavioral Sciences This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/272 Theorizing Diffusion: Tarde and Sorokin Revisited By ELIHU KATZ ABSTRACT: This article is a call for volunteers to stand on the shoulders of Gabriel Tarde and Pitirim Sorokin, who dared to theorize the process of diffusion over a wide variety of disciplines. While all of the social sciences and humanities regularly produce case studies of diffusion, theorizing seems paralyzed. This paralysis stems from the ostensible incommensurability of diffusing items; their refusal to hold still in transit; the complexity of their interactions with the cultures, social structures, and media systems in which potential adopters are embedded; the difficulty of reconciling voluntary action and external imposition; and the lack of a disciplinary home. It cannot be far wrong to assert that every one of the social sciences and humanities has, at least intermittently, given attention to the question of how things- ideas and practices- get from here to there. The problem is as central to the history of religion as it is to the anthropology of culture contact or the sociology of fashion. In medical epidemiology, it is a matter of continuous concern. Marketing is all about diffusion, and so are major aspects of folklore, geography, demography, and art history. Altogether, diffusion research is (or at least was) a way of describing, maybe even explaining, social and cultural change. Yet, there has been very little generalizing of findings across disciplines and, more surprisingly, within disciplines, which is just another way of saying that there is a poverty of theory. There is an apparent paradox at work: the number of diffusion studies continues at a high rate while the growth of appropriate theory is at an apparent standstill. 1 Some part of the paucity of diffusion theory results from the very lack of a label to point to the commonalities between the many disparate case studies of diffusion. Without a label, the spread of hybrid seed-corn in Iowa (studied by rural sociologists and by econometricians) would seem to have little in common with the adoption of fluoridation (studied by social psychologists and political scientists), the AIDS epidemic (studied by epidemiologists), or stylistic change (studied by linguists and historians of the arts). A major new study on the spread of early Christianity, for example, does not even use the word "diffusion," though it is equipped with the most advanced sociological and historical theories and methods, including up-to-date ideas about social networks (Stark 1997). Elihu Katz is Trustee Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and professor emeritus of sociology and communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also is a research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and at the Guttman Center, Israel Democracy Institute. He is coauthor of several diffusion studies, including Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication (with P. F. Lazarsfeld), Medical Innovation: A Diffusion Study (with J. S. Coleman and H. Menzel), The Politics of Community Conflict: The Fluoridation Decision (with R. L. Crain and D. Rosenthal), and The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of "Dallas" (with T. Liebes). NOTE: The author wishes to thank Ying Ma for help with locating references to Tarde and Sorokin. The author also wishes to thank the Bogliasco Foundation for its hospitality at the Liguria Study Center, where this article was completed. The fact is that hardly anybody with the major exception of Everett Rogers-has taken charge of claiming, collecting, and cataloguing these disparate cases for comparison. 2 Moreover, comparison is exceptionally difficult because there is so much difference between diffusing items, because the items themselves refuse to hold still, because it is difficult to separate form from function from meaning, and because of the incredible varieties of cultures and social structures involved. Moreover, there is confusion over how to theorize diffusion based both on voluntary acceptance and on imposition and force. These difficulties have frustrated the process of generalization even within those disciplines- such as rural sociology and marketing that see the problem of diffusion as central. There are only a few disciplines that focus explicitly on diffusion problems, and fewer still that perceive, or cope with, its inherent interdisciplinarity. Almost nobody admits to owning the problem, and the state of theory shows it. The most recent contender for the role of custodian of diffusion theory and research is the field of mass communication. Anthropology, archaeology, and geography made their bids rather long ago but withdrew; at least they did not persist into modernity. 3 It might seem obvious that communication research should subsume diffusion research, but the fact is that the premises of the study of mass communication are at odds- or used to be- with those of diffusion research. Empirical research on the effects of mass communication harks back to assumptions about mass society. These assumptions postulated (1) atomized and alienated individuals, connected to each other only instrumentally or contractually, and (2) powerful new media- beginning with radio- capable of imposing ideas effectively and simultaneously, as if by remote control. This image of the workings of the electronic media- albeit an exaggerated one- virtually negates the image of diffusion as the progress of innovation over time and space, based on more or less voluntary acceptance.4 But empirical research on the actual workings of media influence soon found that the media were less powerful than had been thought, and that, far from having vanished, primary relations were alive and relevant to the flow of mass communications. Interpersonal relations, it was found, act both as custodians of social norms and as networks of information and influence. 5 Among Paul Lazarsfeld's group at Columbia University, this correction to the image of mass society led to a subsequent series of studies on the interaction between mass media and interpersonal communication in the diffusion process. 6 As a further result, and partly by coincidence, these media sociologists bumped into the parallel work being carried on, quite without any mutual awareness, by the group of sociologists studying the diffusion of new farm practices (see Katz 1960, 1961). (The rural sociologists, working at the more traditional end of the sociological spectrum, had never assumed that farmers did not talk to other farmers.) This union was very promising for it strengthened the idea that a new interdiscipline of communication (mass and interpersonal) might emerge as the locus in which to grow diffusion theory. Methodologically, it promised to marry survey research with sociometry. Substantively, it pointed toward shared interest in the role of communication in Third World modernization, which was ultimately derailed because of ideological concerns. Apart from giving a major impetus to network research, and a continuing presence in the study of health campaigns, this bid also seems to have faltered, and little of theoretical interest seems to be happening nowadays, as far as I can see. Moreover, academic fashion has moved the spotlight away from a view of communication as transportation, emphasizing the flow of influence in space, to a view of communication as culture or ritual, emphasizing the time-biased production of meaning and identity (Carey1977). AN ACCOUNTING SCHEME FOR DIFFUSION STUDIES I may be wrong, but I think that the best we can say about the state of diffusion theory is that there is a more or less agreed paradigm--better, an accounting scheme--that allows for the classification of the wide variety of available case studies. True, there is the general S curve in the adoption of innovations and its more sophisticated elaborations; there is the general rule of trickle-down from higher to lower status;
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